Draw the Curtain at Patron Gallery

MIKA HORIBUCHI Draw the Curtain June 25th – August 13th, 2016

Opening Reception: Saturday, June 25th, 4 – 7PM

PATRON is proud to present our first solo exhibition with Chicago based artist Mika Horibuchi. The exhibition titled Draw the Curtain will open on Saturday June 25th from 4 – 7PM and continue through August 13th, 2016.

The phrase “draw the curtain” has two contradictory meanings – to pull aside and allow for something beyond the frame to be revealed, and to pull in front of, to conceal. Drawing (painting) the curtain on or off, creating an image, is simultaneously hiding and revealing of something. A curtain is not necessarily supposed to be looked at, rather, when placed in front of us our natural response is to look through it. We are inclined to ask what lies beyond the curtain. Examining the space between materiality and image, perception and deception, the works in “Draw the curtain” addresses ideas of self-referential flatness in painting. The notion of screens and mirrors are introduced as a viewing device that compresses vision and orchestrates a way of seeing, things to look at and to look through. Referencing the eye and its interaction with surrounding realities, illusions and artifice are created while different levels of deception involved in pictorial illusionism are revealed.

Miranda at Anat Ebgi Gallery

Knut Ivar Aaser Ethan Cook Mika Horibuchi Erica Mahinay

"MIRANDA" JUNE 11 – JULY 16, 2016

If you pull back the curtain, you’ll find some scene — scattered fruits, glasses, a deck of cards, some animal tearing into the skin of a rotten fig. Each object is carefully placed, backed by a burgeoning ballet of dizzy flies and dusty butterflies. This dinner theater is about a passage; the mundane miracles of growth and rot. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity but it’s about a transition, not some memento mori. I arranged it for you, but it seems you let the candle burn out.

I can’t think of a better place for the smoke and mirrors, seated precariously next to someone’s peach. You can’t help but want the flesh when things look better than they taste. A spiraling curl of a citrus peel is sensuous, but it’s bitter to the tip of the tongue. Fruit is a fickle friend. Bitter. Then sweet. Then putrid. Either way it ends up on someone’s plate, yours or theirs.

Carrion, musk and sickly sweets are to be savored. An herbaceous preparation, a perfume of putrescense hangs heavy like a dead swan. There’s still some graceful gesture in a long neck, she nods to dinner and winks to the wheel. Fortune favors none save some and I’m certain our friends have all found theirs.

But if it’s about the extravagance, opulence is a virtue. I say go and gild the lily. Abundance is a luxury and with all the world’s possessions, there are plentitudes to procure. It isn’t excess if it’s just enough.

"Things" at Soccer Club Club

“Things” Soccer Club Club curated by Becca Mann

April 22nd - June 22nd 2016 Opening reception on April 22nd from 7-10pm

Here is a collection of objects that address the multiple implications of being a “thing” Artworks challenge the parameters of their physical forms - they are made of unexpected materials or extend into unreliable dimensions. Some works don't act like art at all, they are useful items that malfunction in compelling ways, artist-made merchandise, reconfigured domestic objects, absurdist and dystopian anomalies. The spaces between mediums, and between the categories object and art are home to a particular intermingling of forms, with things working on many levels simultaneously. The exhibition provides an environment that encourages and frames these unusual ontological processes.

Soccer Club Club is an exhibition and performance space owned and operated by Drag City and located in an intact private bar built by a former Polish soccer star. Becca Mann in an artist from Los Angeles, CA

No Secret at LVL3 Gallery

LVL3 presents No Secret, a two-person exhibition featuring new works by Chicago-based artist Mika Horibuchi and New York-based Jordan Nassar. Horibuchi plays with paint in order to translate an idea from one platform to another, often incorporating trickery and illusion. Nassar proposes ideas of cultural absorption — when influences become passively inherited. No Secret presents both of these artist’s fine detail in craft, which addresses the gap between shared information and its translation.

Opening Reception Saturday 16 April 2016 6 – 10pm

Sub Rosa at Loudhailer Gallery

LOUDHAILER is pleased to present Sub Rosa, curated by Becca Mann. Featuring works by Megan Greene, Mika Horibuchi, Summer Mann, Claire Nereim, Min Song, Kianja Strobert and Kristen Van Deventer. The exhibition opens with a public reception on March 12 from 6-8 PM, and continues through April 23.

The seven artists included in Sub Rosa have developed highly individualistic visual languages. Physical forms vary greatly from one composition to the next, yet there is a unique commonality in the endeavor. The traditional parameters of a discipline are stretched by the introduction of new and ingenious methods, and one medium is pollinated with material aspects of another. The exhibition seeks out zones between categories of ‘thing’, where the operation of an art object is deconstructed, subverted, or transposed onto another, extradiagetic context.

Selected paintings by Summer Mann focus on one theme in her work, where the subject is held in a balance between articulation and obliteration in a field of color, inclement weather, the physicality of the painting itself. Megan Greene’s delicate, carefully rendered drawings oscillate dialectically with a violent, apparently haphazard treatment of the paper. Through a matrix of interlocking patterns, negative spaces are created via erasure, tearing and cutting away. Kianja Strobert’s latest work melds painting’s sensorial language with sculptural forms and phenomenal interactions, combining multiple vocabularies in affective and poetic compositions.

Claire Nereim’s Soft Comb sculptures exist somewhere between language, symbol and ornament. Taking letter forms and instruments as starting points, but quickly moving in an unexpected direction, the works subvert the classical purpose or function of any of the above categories. Mika Horibuchi’s site-specific works Punctation Start and Punctuation End bracket the interior architecture of the gallery space, appearing to hover in the corners, their intense blue and red carpet patterns optically vibrating. Min Song’s sculptural floor work references the visual language of architecture and art pedagogy to diagram the comprehension of space and form. Material refinement beguiles our curiosity in the complex apparatus underlying the beautiful surfaces of the works.

Kristen Van Deventer’s pair of paintings, identically titled Vase of Flowers (After Cezanne, After Redon) are twins - an indirect mark was made on one, then replicated on the second. The stamped nature of each small field of color is complicated by the presence of unique brushstrokes - evidence of the artist applying paint to her cutout petal and leaf forms. In exhibiting the two works side-by-side, Van Deventer's pieces celebrate material innovation and the radical extrapolation of paintings possibilities. Megan Greene (b. Chicago, IL) received her MFA from Rutgers University. Her work has been exhibited at Regards (Chicago); Carrie Secrist Gallery (Chicago); Kinz, Tollou and Feigen (New York, NY) and the Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago). She lives and works in Chicago.

Mika Horibuchi (b. San Francisco) received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Selected exhibitions include LVL3 (Chicago); Heaven Gallery (Chicago); Zhou B Art Center (Chicago); The Franklin (Chicago) and Patron Gallery (Chicago). She lives and works in Chicago.

Summer Mann (b. Ames, Iowa) studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Cummington Community of the Arts, UCLA, and CalArts in Los Angeles. Her exhibitions include the Santa Monica Art Museum (Santa Monica, CA) and Rose Gallery (Santa Monica, CA). She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Claire Nereim (b. Chicago, IL) received her BFA from Oberlin College and her MFA from CalArts. Her work has been exhibited at Jancar Jones (Los Angeles); Ms. Barbers (Los Angeles), Cardi Black Box (Milan, Italy); Curtat Tunnel (Lausanne, Switzerland) and Sabina Lee Gallery (Los Angeles). She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Min Song (b. Los Angeles, CA) received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from the University of Illinois, Chicago. She has had solo exhibitions at Michael Jon Gallery (Miami, FL) and Young Art (Los Angeles, CA). Group exhibitions include Carrie Secrist Gallery (Chicago); New Capital (Chicago) and Andrew Rafacz Gallery (Chicago). She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Kianja Strobert (b. New York, NY) received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from Yale University (New Haven, CT). Solo exhibitions include Tilton Gallery (New York, NY); Zach Feuer Gallery (New York, NY); Santa Monica Museum of Art (Santa Monica, CA) and the Studio Museum of Harlem (New York, NY). Her work has been included in exhibitions at Marlborough Gallery (New York, NY); Harris Lieberman Gallery (New York, NY); Lehman Maupin (New York, NY); Tilton Gallery (New York, NY) and the Contemporary Arts Museum (Houston, TX). She lives and works in Hudson, NY.

Kristen Van Deventer (b. Los Angeles, CA) received her BFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art and her MFA from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Solo exhibitions include Regards (Chicago); David Petersen Gallery (Minneapolis, MN) and Michael Jon Gallery (Miami, FL). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Patron Gallery (Chicago); Team Gallery (New York, NY); Marc Foxx (Los Angeles); Kate Werble Gallery (New York, NY) and LOUDHAILER (Los Angeles). She lives and works in Los Angeles.